


Mission

by Shinaka



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Black Eagles Route, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Black Eagles Route Spoilers, M/M, Mentioned Blue Lions Students (Fire Emblem), Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 01:22:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20685164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shinaka/pseuds/Shinaka
Summary: Takes place during Black Eagles Ch. 17 where all possible students were recruited. HEAVY SPOILERS (AND ANGST).Ashe truly believed in Edelgard and in her cause. A world without Crests, a corrupt Church, and where children no longer had to become thieves.But why would the Goddess be this cruel when he had this important mission to fulfill?





	Mission

**Author's Note:**

> I did an incredibly stupid thing and stayed up late on a work night to finish this rather than waiting a day to make sure it would be more tightly written because I am ADDICTED to writing this pair goddamit
> 
> Also this fic functions on the assumption that everyone (except Dimitri of course) thought Dedue was dead until Black Eagles Ch. 17.
> 
> Lastly, this fic was the result of me trying to write a goddamn SAUNA fic about the two. What the hell.

A week before the battle against the Kingdom, his erstwhile home, Ashe had been pulled aside by the professor for a private conversation in her quarters.

“You know as well as I do that we will be warring against the Kingdom soon,” the professor had begun, heels clicking against the wooden floorboards as she ushered the archer in front of her and then closed the door behind them. “And I know that this is your homeland we’re speaking of. You don’t have to be in the frontlines. I can easily put you in a support role. Some of your former Blue Lions classmates have already requested to be in such positions.”

In his head, Ashe had rattled off the likely names: _Annette, Mercedes. Maybe Ingrid._

“I cannot guarantee that your role won’t change depending on how the battle goes, however.” The professor’s expression had turned sorrowful. "But I can still make it much harder for you to have to fight against Kingdom troops.”

Ashe had been given a few days to think about his choice. He understood that his professor did not want to burden him unduly with deciding right then and there in her room. And although he believed fully in the professor and Edelgard’s mission – a world where class would no longer matter and children did not have to become thieves – the thought of fighting his former king still gave him pause. 

Around the monastery, however, confident optimism began to seize soldiers, scholars, merchants, and villagers alike. Whispers that the war’s end was in sight turned into murmurs, then into declarations among comrades, and then finally into proclamations of joy among the masses whenever the Empire’s standard was held aloft during preparations for the trip to Faerghus. 

Watching their faces light up after years of weary war, Ashe couldn’t help but be swept up along with their hopes and dreams, especially when he remembered that they had come together from such disparate places. The former priests or nuns who had grown disillusioned with the Church and with the archbishop. Families fleeing from the chaos in the Kingdom. Second sons or the Crestless children of nobles. Women with Crests and hollow eyes who picked up weapons for the first time with reverence equal to the amount of autonomy they had never had. Recruits who dared, for the first time, to earn the prestige and status automatically conferred to their noble peers.

Then there was Ashe. He had seen his parents die senselessly, then had to struggle with his siblings senselessly for sustenance, and had become – but not so many others who had to both live and die in poverty – a noble’s adopted son senselessly.

Then he had to lay his adoptive brother and father to rest because of the Church.

Senseless.

If His Majesty could just see the purpose for which the professor and Edelgard fought, surely he, too, would agree on the principles on which the war was based on, Ashe thought ruefully.

After a day and a half, Ashe approached the professor with his decision.

“Thank you for being so kind with letting me decide if I want to stay back with the support group, Professor,” he began. “But I will not. In fact, please let me fight with the main army."

As a knight-in-training, Ashe was supposed to learn to fight for his chosen lord and their values. He had chosen the professor and Edelgard. Until their values ran afoul of his, he would promise fealty to them and to those that they had taken under their banner. Surely, this was what was meant by being a knight, even if he had just committed to charging not just his own homeland but also the homeland of the knights he had once been inspired by.

A long moment passed as his former teacher seemed to take in his words and while so doing, studied him intently with pale green eyes that pierced.

Finally she said, “All right, Ashe.”

* * *

Ironically, it was after he had sealed his decision to fight against his homeland head-on that Ashe began to wonder what Dedue would have thought.

Even though he had likely been dead for a few years.

The archer knew immediately what Dedue would have said to him.

_An enemy of my king is also my enemy. _

There would have been no thinking involved in the decision. The retainer lived and breathed only for His Majesty. Ashe couldn’t even bring himself to resent that about him – it was simply fact.

And in the end, was the archer really so different? He, too, was also carving a straight path through the world following in the footsteps of someone greater. Ideals he had long yearned to fulfill could, with his lords’ blessing, finally be realized.

If only the intersection of those lines wouldn't end in violence every time. _If only there had been another way_, and Ashe’s nails began to dig into his palms.

Then he let out the breath he had been holding – regrets and hypotheticals shuddering out of his thin chest – and he set out once more for the training area. After all, there were only four days left until they marched toward Fhirdiad.

* * *

In the flurry of preparation that preceded a war march – practice sparring, foot drills, the distribution of supplies and horses – it was much easier not to think of Dedue’s impassive yet disapproving face, even if it still lingered in the back of his mind and pounced when Ashe was at his most unsuspecting. 

But on the eve of the march on the fields outside Fhirdiad, Ashe found himself in his shared tent with Sylvain and Felix struggling with a phantom.

Maybe it was the proximity to his former Majesty’s capital. Maybe his professor was right to have such reservations about him going off to the front lines. Maybe this was simply part of the due all traitors to their homelands received, regardless of how just their mission might be.

On the border between waking and dreaming, the archer wanted only for Dedue to understand.

That Ashe had traveled up and down Faerghus whenever Edelgard gave him leave to try to find the retainer, through mountains and snow.

That Ashe had waited for and then hounded anyone capable of relaying reliable information from the Kingdom at the height of its internal discord and trips there alone had become unsafe.

That Ashe had crept up to the top of the Goddess Tower many times in the hopes of imitating their first meeting there five years ago; hoping that even if the Church were a farce, the goddess might still bring Dedue back, even if She could not bring back his parents, Christophe, and Lonato.

Even then.

Dedue’s apparition was furious.

“Is he not your king, Ashe?” He whispered.

“Where has your loyalty gone?” He hissed.

“Whoever goes against His Majesty is my enemy,” He snarled.

Against the dead man’s reproach, Ashe gritted his teeth, then ground them until his face felt taut yet brittle.

When Dedue appeared to fall silent, eyes drawn as if the archer was the most despicable person alive, Ashe was on the edge of responding when a rough grab of his arm from the side shook him firmly into the world of the living.

In the dark, Sylvain was a whisper close to his ear. “Hey, are you all right? It really sounded like you were going through some nightmare.”

Ashe’s blankets were askew and twisted around his limbs. Although he had begun the night sleeping side-by-side with Sylvain, his legs were now on top of the redhead’s and his hands brushed the edge of Felix’s bedroll.

On his face, he felt warm tears mar his cheeks and throat, with more easily flowing from his eyes when he blinked in the cold air.

Ashe could only weakly stammer, “O-oh,” in response.

If the noble realized, he didn’t let it show. “Take a moment to breathe, okay? I know we’re about to go into a big showdown but we have more than enough experience going into this,” Sylvain said, sincerely reassuring for once.

“Thanks,” Ashe replied quietly. “That’s nice of you to say.”

He didn’t remember much of their conversation following that, and after a few minutes, his friend appeared satisfied enough with Ashe’s recovering state that he went back to sleep.

As the archer attempted sleep once more, he found himself murmuring what he had hoped to say to Dedue back in his dream.

_“I’m sorry, but I have a mission that I must see through. I’m so sorry."_

* * *

Despite his terrible sleep, the rain, and the hidden threat of reinforcements from the Church and the Kingdom, Ashe felt the most clear-headed he had in days.

He did not take glee in cutting down his former homeland’s knights but neither did he quail before them. Even when some of them turned into Demonic Beasts, which threw Sylvain and the men immediately around him into disarray for a few moments, Ashe stared at them with grim determination and a silent prayer for who they used to be.

At the rear of Sylvain's battalion, Ashe notched arrows onto one of his best bows and let loose volleys that cleared the way for his friend and the other close-range troops to ford a river separating them from their former king. It was a slow and dreary process, but progress was at least easily measured by the sight of men and women trickling toward the other side of the river.

When the archer’s boots finally sank into the mud of the river to begin his march forward, one of the last to cross, he suddenly heard Sylvain yell from the far shore.

“Dedue! Dedue, is that you?!” The usually unflappable noble was clearly in shock.

Across the river, Ashe’s heart seized. Then his body gripped by the urge to run.

The sloshing of feet, the weaving around surprised soldiers, shouts of astonishment. The archer had never been more glad for his ability to move quickly through a crowd, even if it came from one of the darkest times of his life.

At last, Sylvain was in view and before him was an unobstructed view of the fields before his once capital. 

And an arrow’s length away from the redhead was a large dark-skinned man with short white hair in heavy armor. The only Duscur man on the battlefield. He could only possibly be the former king’s retainer.

Dedue was alive. 

The Goddess had truly answered his plea.

But as happiness gave way to the facts of their circumstances, Ashe realized with horror that his battalion would have to be the one to face off against Dedue first. A once dead man come alive, ordinarily a dream come true but for the fact that he was only resurrected to kill or be killed again. The shaking began in his hands, then spread across his entire body until he could barely remain standing.

Already Sylvain had gotten over his surprise at seeing a supposedly dead comrade and was preparing his horse and lance for a charge, even as he shouted, “Dedue, please stand down! I don’t want to fight you if I can help it!”

The retainer did not reply.

“Come on, Dedue, the Kingdom is already on the brink of collapse!” Sylvain was beginning to plead. “You can still be spared!”

Dedue still did not reply. However, even through the quaking that refused to stop, Ashe noticed that the man’s form was beginning to shake just like his.

And an ugly premonition burst into being in the archer’s mind. He had never ever seen Dedue tremble before, not even when he had nearly fallen before axes to the back and the cruel magic of Dark Mages.

Even though the chances were next to nil that Dedue would remain alive by the end of the skirmish, no less join their side, Ashe held onto the single frenzied hope that he could change what was happening. He knew that intellectually, it didn’t make sense and that he was probably transmuting fear – fear of having to kill his once love, fear for Dedue who seemed to be buckling from great pain – into a delusion.

But why would the Goddess be so cruel?

So Ashe screamed. At the top of his lungs, with such desperate volume that it halted and silenced Sylvain and the rest of their battalion.

“Dedue, it’s me, Ashe! Please listen to Sylvain! Please, please, please!” He was crying again already but manliness was useless next to what Ashe wanted most.

“We have a mission to make the world finally be equal! It wouldn’t matter that you don’t have a Crest or that you’re from Duscur. Please, this world will only become a better place for you, Dedue!”

He walked past Sylvain and toward the loyal retainer.

“Don’t throw your life away!” The archer shouted.

The battlefield was becoming a blur.

Oh, because Ashe was running again.

Maybe Sylvain was yelling at him to get back. Maybe Ashe was just running to his death. 

But maybe Dedue might not need to die again after all.

Stopping just before the arrows of the other side could touch him, the knight-to-be was able to get close enough to see Dedue’s face better.

And to hear him.

“A-Ashe… I am glad to see you one last time.” 

The Duscur man’s voice was strained. Across his brow and face, sweat pooled and dripped. He was smiling but it seemed propped up by shards of glass. 

Before Ashe could ask what was wrong, he noticed an object in the armored knight’s hands before which his words died.

The largest Crest Stone the archer had ever seen was in Dedue’s hands. Black tendrils radiated from it and were beginning to cover his hands, his chest, his legs.

_But why would the Goddess be so cruel?_

When Dedue noticed where Ashe’s eyes laid, he closed his eyes in sorrow.

“I am sorry we will not be able to… to cook together… and to garden again.”

More black tendrils. More of Dedue’s body being consumed. More tears falling from Ashe’s eyes.

“Dedue. Dedue! Dedue!”

The archer didn’t even have the power to ask why because all he would get was an answer he already knew.

“It is time,” the most loyal of all retainers that Ashe had ever known said. By this point, only his face was left uncovered by the Crest Stone’s sickness.

In as loud a voice he could muster, loud enough for their Majesty who Ashe only just noticed was a ways behind Dedue to hear, the retainer made his last proclamations.

“Your Majesty… I will avenge your father.” Dedue’s eyes were the only parts left that Ashe could see. 

He would remember those determined yet sad green eyes forever.

“You are the one true king… Dimitri,” Dedue cried out, and then he was blinded and lost to them all.

Ashe screamed and screamed.

* * *

After the battle, Ashe requested time alone on the battlefield. Edelgard and the professor gave him a worried look but he persisted in asking anyway. It helped that Sylvain had also been there with him, although he, too, looked like he wanted to stop Ashe. But in the end, the archer had been granted his wish.

He walked for a time among guttering fires, puddles tinted red, and the bodies of Kingdom troops. The battlefield was large but he knew exactly where he was going.

Once he reached his destination, the archer went down onto his knees before the body of a large Duscur man in heavy armor, who laid on his side in a pool of blood.

The cursed Crest stone rested nearby in a small depression in the ground.

For a while, Ashe remained in that position before Dedue, even when his knees began to ache and other battle wounds began to make themselves felt. A small price to pay for what his love had to endure.

At last, the knight-to-be spoke.

“I have a mission that I must complete. And you did, too.”

He reached out his hand to stroke the brilliant white hair atop Dedue’s head. It still felt warm to the touch.

“I’m so sorry."


End file.
